2011/06/13

Die Anti-Terror-Lüge / The counter-terrorism lie

Among other info it brought forward this statistics graphic about the amount of German telecommunications surveillance actions:

It reads:
(title: "Causes for telecommunication surveillance 2009")

drug trade

robbery / blackmailing

organised theft

drug possession

homicide

public order

scams

handling of stolen goods

human trafficking

tax fraud

terrorism

child pornography

This graph makes extremely obvious what Peter Schaar (federal government appointee for data privacy and freedom of information) said as well:

Terrorism is merely the justification de jour for additional state powers and less privacy protection. The previous boogey man was organised crime, about which you can't hear much any more since 2001. Child pornography is also a fashionable boogeyman, including a rather fictional child pornography industry.

Rule of thumb: No matter how 'good' the boogeyman, we need to stay calm and weigh the costs and benefits of actions such as reduced privacy or more generally loss of protective rights against the state.

The boogeyman is often merely a false motivation, a marketing trick that serves completely different purposes.

1 comment:

Even though I'm opposed to the way the past governments expanded the powers of our law enforcement and intelligence community, I cannot really say, that I'm against surveillance actions as part of investigations against very serious crimes (organised crime, drug trade, human trafficking, murder). Of course only with a warrant and probable cause ("überzeugender Verdacht").More transparency on part of our government would be welcome. No, actually it should be the natural thing to do.